Chapter 14 page 322
Table 14.1: Two sets of cognitive prompts
Cognitive Prompts for Conducting Experiments Cognitive Prompts for Solving Problems
For each experiment, you need to do the following:
- Create a plan with:
A sketch showing how you will set up the
experiment.
A description of what you will do and exactly what
you will measure. - Do your experiment.
Record your data in a clear and organized way.
Record any problems you had in doing your
experiment. - Analyze your data and present your conclusions.
State any laws you discovered that predict and
describe what happens
Give an explanation for why this happens.
Explain how your results agree or disagree with what
you predicted would happen when you stated your
hypotheses.
Adapted from White and Frederiksen (1998)
PLANNING- What is the problem?
What are we trying to do here? - What do we know about the problem so far?
What information is given to us?
How can this help us? - What is our plan?
- Is there another way to do this?
What would happen if...? - What should we do next?
MONITORING- Are we using our plan or strategy?
Do we need a new plan?
Do we need a different strategy? - Has our goal changed?
What is our goal now? - Are we on the right track?
Are we getting closer to our goal?
EVALUATING - What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- What would we do differently next time?
King (1991)The second column in Table 14.1 shows a set of cognitive prompts to teach fifth graders to solve
problems (A. King, 1991). Collectively, these questions were designed to promote self-regulated problem
solving by encouraging effective goal setting, monitoring, and self-evaluation. These cognitive prompts
were designed to be generally useful on a wide range of problems.
The cognitive prompts in Table 14.1 are designed to help students remember to use strategies that
they might otherwise forget to use. The prompts also provide useful information about the order in which
strategies can be productively used. The prompts are general prompts that can be used with any
experiment, not just one kind of experiment. The problem solving prompts can be used to guide problem
solving on many different kinds of problems. As students ask each other these general questions, they are
learning general questions that they can apply to many similar tasks (Davis, 2003).
Another approach to providing cognitive prompts is called guided peer questioning (A. King, 1994;
1999, 2002). In guided peer questioning, students read a passage within a chapter and then question each
other about that passage using question stems to generate their questions. A question stem is a question
with blanks for students to fill in as they ask each other questions. Examples are “Why is __ important?”
and “How are ___ and __ different?” Students studying a health textbook might fill in the blanks to
ask each other questions such as “Why are lungs important?” and “How are white blood cells and red
blood cells different?” When one student asks a question, the other answers, and then together they evaluate
the answer—checking whether it is correct or elaborating with more information.